Social robots are being designed to use human-like communication techniques, including body language, social signals, and empathy, to work effectively with people. Just as between people, some robots learn about people and adapt to them. In this paper we present one such robot design: we developed Sam, a robot that learns minimal information about a person's background, and adapts to this background. Our in-the-wild study found that people helped Sam for significantly longer when it adapted to match their background. While initially we saw this as a success, in re-considering our study we started seeing a different angle. Our robot effectively deceived people (changed its story and text), based on some knowledge of their background, to get more work from them. There was little direct benefit to the person from this adaptation, yet the robot stood to gain free labor. We would like to pose the question to the community: is this simply good robot design, or, is our robot being manipulative? Where does the ethical line lay between a robot leveraging social techniques to improve interaction, and the more negative framing of a robot or algorithm taking advantage of people? How can we decide what is good here, and what is less desirable?

We investigate robots using infrasound, low-frequency vibrational energy at or near the human hearing threshold, as an interaction tool for working with people. Research in psychology suggests that the presence of infrasound can impact a person's emotional state and mood, even when the person is not acutely aware of the infrasound. Although often not noticed, infrasound is commonly present in many situations including factories, airports, or near motor vehicles. Further, a robot itself can produce infrasound. Thus, we examine if infrasound may impact how people interpret a robot's social communication: if the presence of infrasound makes a robot seem more or less happy, energetic, etc., as a result of impacting a person's mood. We present the results from a series of experiments that investigate how people rate a social robot's emotionally-charged gestures, and how varied levels and sources of infrasound impact these ratings. Our results show that infrasound does have a psychological effect on the person's perception of the robot's behaviors, supporting this as a technique that a robot can use as part of its interaction design toolkit. We further provide a comparison of infrasound generation methods.

We investigated interactive agents using subliminal priming - the act of exposing a person to stimuli that they may not consciously notice, but are still processed subliminally in their mind - in an attempt to shape a person's mood and behavior. We present an overview of the psychology of subliminal priming from the perspective of how it applies to human-agent interaction, including a discussion of the potential ethical and practical implications. We further present the results from two exploratory studies (one in-lab, one crowdsourced) that present potential subliminal-priming interfaces. Our results suggest that subliminal priming may impact how participants perceive an agent and how much they enjoy a task, but we failed to find any effect of priming on participant mood or agent persuasiveness. This work aims to raise awareness of the dangers of subliminal methods of priming and contributes to the discussion on the ethics of social agents.